10 Years of Marvel Comic Movie Magic -Part 1 (Which Movie Posesses the Infinity Stones?)

Insight:

Every time you turn around, it feels like there's a new superhero movie coming to theaters.  The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is literally taking over the movie industry, one film at a time.  How did this happen?

The idea to do a Marvel Cinematic Universe themed project came to me with the big buzz surrounding the approaching Oscars.  But this data viz is going to be a little different than my previous projects.  I'm going to take the next few posts to REALLY dig down deep into the superhero world of movies.  After getting some amazing (and enlightening) feedback from some pros in the data science world, I thought this project should focus more on analysis and less on the data visual design.  Hope y'all have got your armor on because I am about to blast open some superhero data.

Simply put, I wanted to see why the Marvel Cinematic Universe is dominating the box office- how much money has the franchise made as a whole, and which movies are (based on just this data set) the breadwinners of the Marvel world.  For those people have not yet succumbed to the dark side, you're about to find out what us comic nerds are so excited about!

Data Viz:

Here is the link to the Tableau Public Workbook on my portfolio.

Insight:

Because every superhero needs a back story, let me fill you in on Marvel's money-making movie history: 

The MCU franchise as a whole has done extremely well in Hollywood over the last ten (10) years.  Marvel movies have grossed over $17.5 million dollars in box office sales (which is about 1.75 billion a year in revenues).  Because the franchise has only spent $4.4 billion dollars (about 367 million dollars a year) on making these movies, they have pulled in around $790 million dollars in profit made EACH YEAR!  By the end of year ten (10), the MCU franchise has made a total estimated profit of $13.1 billion dollars.  That is an astronomical amount of money.  Tony Stark is embarrassingly wealthier than Bruce Wayne.

With the Oscar buzz coming and people raving over Marvel's incredible Black Panther, the whole world is waiting with bated breath to see if Black Panther sweeps the awards this year.  (And if you're not waiting in excruciating anticipation, you need to go back to Marvel film #1 and watch them all in proper order, and become obsessed with the franchise like the rest of us not-normal people.) 

The Black Panther has already out-performed all the other Marvel movies, with the exception of the three (3) films in the Avengers series.  The MCU franchise has four (4) out of the top ten (10) highest grossing films ever made, and Black Panther is currently holding its own at film #9 out of #10.  The Avenger films are sitting at spots 4, 6, and 8- because Avatar and Titanic are still defending the top two spots like movie champions. (I'd like to take this moment to nominate James Cameron for GOTG3). In Hollywood 'big-wig' speak, movies are valued based on their return of dollars spent and their box office revenues.  The Back Panther film ALONE earned $5.41 for every dollar spent and took home over $1.3 billion from the box office.  Whoa.  That's a lot of money!

The MCU franchise has five (5) additional movies that also reached over the billion dollar mark, but only two (2) of the six films were first installments.  The Black Panther and The Avengers.  (For those of you who may be more low-key moviegoers, 'the first installment' means the first movie in a series.)

Now that we've learned a little bit about how bad-a$$ the MCU is in terms of box office revenue, let's take a look at the other side...because you can't have winners without losers, and every superhero fan loves an underdog... 

The MCU's film, "Captian America: The First Avenger' performed horribly (not as bad as the Incredible Hulk by Universal, but close) as compared to other MCU movies at the box office.  While I don't think any of our wives were complaining about watching Chris Evans (and his shirtless scene) on the big screen for two (2) hours, us superhero fans were relatively skeptical.  The return on every dollar spent was only $0.71.  The box office revenue only pulled in $370.6 million dollars.  The film was one of the franchise's largest disappointments as compared to the other MCU movies. 

Don't worry though, Captian America did much better for the second and third installments, and little boys were quickly trading in their Iron Man gear for a star-spangled shield. 

One of Marvels' superpowers is the ability to create sequels and follow-up movie that outperform the initial film.  Second and third installments tend to do better in both the return on the dollar spent and box office revenues.  For example, Captain America: Civil War did three (3) times better than Captain America: The First Avenger.  The sequels for both Ant-Man and the Guardians of the Galaxy made about $100 million more than their first movies.  Thor: Ragnarok (the third Thor Film) and Iron Man 3 both doubled (2x) box office sales compared to their first respective movies.  And, while the comic world was largely unimpressed with The Avengers: Age of Ultron (the second Avengers film), Marvel absolutely KILLED IT with infinity Wars (the third Avengers film).  In fact, Inifinty Wars made $500 million more than The Avengers and pulled in over $2 billion through box office sales.    

Based on these trends, Endgame should be the best performing movie of the entire Marvel Franchise.  Endgame is the 4th movie in the Avengers series, and if we use data as our guide, Endgame will easily break the $2 billion mark in box office sales.  (Not to mention they left the previous Avengers movie on a fantastic cliff hanger, so how could you NOT go see it?!)  The Avengers Endgame film is scheduled to be released after Captian Marvel.  Unfortunately, the Captain Marvel Film is set to take place 20 years ago.  Hopefully, this will not be a profit killer- as Captain America: The First Avenger also took place back in time.  Comic nerds tend to get far more excited about the future than the past.

Project:

This project is part of a series of analyses that examines different aspects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  The first part was reviewing the movies themselves and their performance at the box office and rate of return, both as a whole and as individual films to one another in this analysis, we can discover outliers and identify which ones should have disappeared after the famous gauntlet "snap" versus films that hold the cinematic power of the infinity stones!

Tools:

• Tableau Public
• Microsoft Excel

Data:

This data set was found was found on Kaggel by Rohit Neppalli.  The data set covers all the movies from 2008 to the end of 2018.  The data set comes with information about the box office revenues, important people involved, movie characters, finical information, and dates.

Here is the data set from Kagle (MCU Movies)

Data Cleaning:

The cleaning fo this data set was completed in Microsoft Excel.  Since the data was fairly simple, it was easier to do a quick clean in a spreadsheet and took about 20 minutes to complete.  A few attributes also needed to be cleaned up for the import in Tableau.

The financial information needed to be replaced with an integer to give it a digital value.  This was completed by changing the text and number into the actual dollar amount.

I also formatted the directors' names into a single cell.  The data also includes other names of people involved in the film, which will be cleaned up during a later post.

The last part of the data clean-up was removing minutes form the 'run time' attribute.  This helped to change the field to an integer (and not a string) format.